Hey! Maybe there's hope for language people after all in a Google Translate world- the term "hoi polloi" means the general masses, commoners (I picked the word from Jeopardy), or as the Chinese/ Japanese/ Korean translators translated it as, "the many." But it generally has a negative connotion and refers to the non-special people like me, with synonyms like "the plebs," "the riffraff," "the masses." That's definitely what I feel like a lot of the time.
I recently went to my law school reunion (10-year reunion was postponed due to Covid) and it... played out a lot like my high school reunion. The cool people who went to Bar Review and such talked to the cool people, and the others kind of scurried around looking for people to talk to. Few people came up to talk to me except the people who are perceived to be even "less cool" than I am. I kind of got this perception in law school, but it's definitely been confirmed throughout the years since: people will gravitate towards people who are cooler, and they don't want to reach down in popularity and be perceived as lowering themselves, for fear they'll be grouped in that lower class. It's very similar to picking out a lunch table at the high school cafeteria: where you sit defines which class you're in. And all my life I've been in the uncool level, the lower levels of the hoi polloi.
Maybe others have gotten over it and made peace with it, but for me just once I'd like to be recognized for something by others, to not be ignored and be the center of attention; I've felt that very few times in my life: at my own wedding and kinda/sorta at high school awards ceremony when I was recognized. Otherwise I've just been totally swept into the hoi polloi, the little fish in a big pond, the consumer that companies are trying to market to, the bottom of the totem pole. Perhaps that's why I've always wanted to get on TV (including my current obsession with Jeopardy), to be known for something, and perhaps explaining why I get jealous and butt-hurt by famous people who seem to get famous for no reason, or worse for bad reasons.
The recognition of my hoi-polloi status came as I was waiting to board a flight onto Delta Airlines recently and found myself once again in Main Cabin 1, along with literally the bottom rung of society- Delta really does a great job of grouping you by status, with the first class boarding first and sitting in the top seats at the front of the plane, and the hoi polloi near the back of the plane with the rest of the peons, so that I look around and the caliber of people around me are not stellar. You are the rung of society that you can afford to pay for or willing to pay for, and on most Delta flights I'm paying the and sitting at the bottom. I feel like the hoi polloi in the stock market too, where it feels rigged against the retail investor like me who doesn't have any inside information whereas Nancy Pelosi's husband is getting inside scoops to sell Nividia well before the big crash in the market. Many speculate the stock market is rigged for the rich and wealthy who just get richer off of it.....now I'm starting to see the truth in it.
It is kind of depressing, really, when I get these realizations often, without much chance of breaking out of that anonymity, no matter what I do. It's unfortunate that in our society the winners get rewarded so much while the losers get nothing: just like Jeopardy, where the winners of a game get to come back and play again, the losers get very little money and are never heard from again after that game, and the ultra-winners who win tons of money get to come back AGAIN after their long streaks and play for another tournament whose winner yields a lot of money. The winning compounds into more winning. Fame is similar: get famous one time for ANYTHING and it will play for one's whole life; you're invited to things because people know you, you'll bring in a large audience, and because of that large audience you'll be selected for something else; you don't need to qualify to get on Jeopardy, you can just get invited to Celebrity Jeopardy! It's like George Carlin once said, "It's a big club, and you ain’t in it."
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